Institutions
In my daily life, I often have occasion to think about institutions. In all legal systems I've encountered, institutions can be treated as separate entities, separate from their owners, their workers. In these systems, institutions, or organizations, have separate legal lives. They typically have the powers and duties of natural persons but they are separately created by, or with the permission of, the government. Unlike natural persons, they can enjoy perpetual lives, lives that go on forever. While they can only take action through the actions of natural persons, their actions are separate from those of the natural persons. With a few exceptions, the natural persons are not individually responsible for their acts on behalf of institutions. The institutions in some sense take on all the characteristics of natural persons. I've often noted that they are born with the filing of some piece of paper, they die in legal dissolution and they can marry through mergers and sales.
With this as background, it should be no surprise that institutions also have personalities of their own. When we speak of corporate culture, we are speaking of the personality of an entity, a personality that may or may not coincide with the personalities of the owners and workers associated with the entity. Someone or some other institution establishes a desired personality for the institution. The institution's personality or culture may or may not match the personality of the people who must act for the institution and others who interact with the institution.. It doesn't matter whether the desired personality is good or bad. If there's a mismatch with the personalities of the natural persons involved, problems ensue.
I see this in lots of circumstances. I see it in employee relations, both employee-institution and employee-employee relations. I see it in dashed expectations of third parties dealing with the institution. I even sometimes see it in relations between owners and the institution, in the differences between the personalities of some of the owners and the owners or the workers who create the institution's personality.
Dr. John Hoover recently wrote a book entitled How to Work for an Idiot. In it he discusses examples of dysfunctional behavior by bosses and how to encourage better behavior. As I thought about some of the examples, I realized that in some cultures, in some institutions, the dysfunctional behavior would be permitted, if not encouraged. In various successful institutions, the dysfunctional behavior would be part of the culture, form the subject of boasts, work as encouragement to the workers. Yet, I found the behavior he identified as distasteful, unkind. How do I reconcile this apparent conflict?
I reconcile it by thinking about institutional personality compared to individual personality. The way to avoid working with people we think of as idiots, or, more likely, with people whose personalities are different from ours, is to recognize that institutions do have personalities. Just as we don't pick as friends people whose personalities are distasteful to us we must find institutions to deal with whose personalities are compatible with our own. When we seek work, we need to find compatible employers. When we are customers, we need to find compatible suppliers. In this way, we will avoid conflict and stop thinking the people we deal with are idiots.
5-10-04
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